


message in a bottle

by picklebridge



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Post-Order 66, lots of death alluded to but not shown, star wars more like sad wars amirite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picklebridge/pseuds/picklebridge
Summary: He wakes up, and he is too late. He wakes up, and he is alone. He wakes up, and he has failed.The Jedi are dead, but they don’t say anything about who killed them. Kix cannot bring himself to ask.-OR: Kix gets woken up after fifty years. A lot has changed.
Relationships: CT-5597 | Jesse & CT-6116 | Kix
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	message in a bottle

**Author's Note:**

> Look man, the clones have no right making me this damn sad. 
> 
> Just - can you even imagine the whiplash Kix must have gone through? Suddenly he's alone, all his friends are dead, there is no Republic, and entire Empire has come and gone, and suddenly he has human rights now because nobody knows any better??? 
> 
> Poor boy needs a hug.

He wakes up, and he is too late.

He wakes up, and he is alone.

He wakes up, and he has failed.

He knows it before they speak, from the moment he says ‘Jedi’ and watches confusion crowd in on unfamiliar faces. A bottomless pit opens in his soul, but he doesn’t realise, yet, just how deep it will go. 

There are no Jedi, they tell him. Haven’t been for decades. One of the strangers pipes up then, says: didn’t someone calling himself a Jedi make a new school somewhere? But the consensus is the same. If there was one, there isn’t now.

The Jedi are dead, but they don’t say anything about who killed them. Kix cannot bring himself to ask.

The endless abyss of space is the first familiar thing he experiences, cryo sickness still crashing over him in little shocky waves.

Say, someone asks eventually, when the wreck of the Obrexta III is several star systems behind them. The Meson Martinet is like no ship he has ever seen or heard of, and dread is sour in his belly. Who put you in that tank anyway? Must have been one crazy fucker, flying a ship that old.

That’s how Kix finds out he’s been asleep for fifty years. Asleep is too kind a word for it; he feels the icy cold of cryo in his soul and starts jolting out of sleep like he’s drowning. Kix thinks that it should be harder to believe. But when the words come out and he considers them, denial will not come. He just nods and turns away, wishes for his bucket to hide the way they knife through him. The truth of it screams in the way everyone looks at him; with their full attention, like he is an individual. They look at him like he is a _man_.

It’s funny, really, because Kix has never been less whole.

The galaxy does not recognise him. For the first time in his life, his body is his own. Maybe once it would have been a blessing, but now it just feels like a wound. No-one else sees the millions of faces that stare back at him in the fresher mirror. Nobody hears their echo when he speaks. They nod and smile when they hear his name, and they never think about the thousands of others that crowd on the back of Kix’s tongue. He is the last of them, his brothers, and the galaxy they died for has forgotten them.

He keeps looking behind him for voices he thinks he can hear calling, wakes up like clockwork for muster on ships that have long since been broken down to scrap. He looks over his shoulders for people that should be stood behind him, then hates himself for the disappointment that follows.

Clones were never built to be alone.

From tube to grave it was the one thing they were all taught to expect - budge over and share, because a brother somewhere is cold.

Someone tells him he is lucky, when the whole ugly tale comes out, and really, there are no words for that. Knowing what he does now, “luck” would have been the cryo tank blowing up when the ship went down.

The first time he gets paid for a job, Kix stares at the little credit chit in his palm and rolls it over with his fingers. Apparently, these are his. He has earned them. It would be theft if they were taken. It took 50,000 of these to make him. They are cold and small. How funny to think that wars are waged over less. Kix folds his fingers over them and puts them into his pocket, then forgets about them until he puts a hole in his boot and realises he can’t just requisition a new pair.

He thinks back to a conversation with Jesse, three months and half a century ago, in a stolen moment in the back of the reactor room. They’d hidden back there for five minutes of quiet and laughed at how they almost missed being Shinies, when they were too unimportant to be searched for. Crouched behind a generator, battle grime still on his face and ship-brewed rotgut in his hands, Jesse had grimaced and sworn that the day they got their personhood, he was going to buy the most expensive liquor he could find. Once he fixes his boots, Kix goes to a cantina and nurses some refined shit from Naboo that makes his throat burn. Jesse had always been partial to the Alderaanian stuff, but it turns out you can’t even get that any more.

Somewhere along the line he has forgotten how to dream, so when he goes to sleep that night with alcohol on his tongue, he remembers.

He closes his eyes and opens them to his brother’s face. He has fallen asleep at his desk again, Tup’s post-mortem report open on the datapad in front of him, and Jesse is scowling, berating him for it before he is even fully awake. Kix reaches out and touches the small ‘5’ on just under Jesse’s pauldron, and can’t bring himself to speak. His brother deflates, and for a moment they are united in silence. The medbay is sterile and white, just the wrong side of too bright no matter what part of the cycle they’re in, but lately all Kix sees is red. They hose down abattoirs when the slaughter is finished, too, but it never really washes away.

Jesse pries him out of his chair with a grunt and many years of practise, and drags him away to the barracks before he has his bearings. Apparently there is a new engine room brew being bartered over sabaac, and Ridge swears it’s better than fighter fuel this time.

Kix’s protests fall on deaf ears, and as he is dragged away he reaches for the datapad, because doesn’t Jesse see? _He is so close._

He wakes up like that, his arm outstretched across blankets that don’t feel right, the words lodged on his tongue. Just a little further, brother, he wants to say. Please, just a little more.

You can’t save us all, Jesse had whispered, his brown eyes pitying. And, well. He always _had_ been smarter than people gave him credit for.


End file.
